From: jdashiel AT eagle1 DOT eaglenet DOT com Date: Fri, 7 Feb 1997 04:25:27 -0500 (EST) To: mharris AT blackwidow DOT saultc DOT on DOT ca Cc: OpenDOS discussion list , opendos-developer AT mail DOT tacoma DOT net Subject: [opendos-developer] Re: [opendos] OS advancements and old technology: My viewpoint. In-Reply-To: Message-Id: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-opendos AT mail DOT tacoma DOT net Precedence: bulk Most developers also don't know when they're writing something that will work on systems using speech synthesizers and screen reader systems. Evidence of this can be seen in the computer stores, or I should say cannot be seen. It costs very little extra to put an extra line of writing on shrink-wrapped software packages that states "useable with speech systems" or "not useable with speech systems". This makes that information unavailable to salespeople, and for those who write stuff that ends up shrink-wrapped my reaction has been to mostly avoid commercial software places for that reason. I don't like to waste my time finding that kind of information out because I do alot of that with shareware and I don't have to arrange transportation to try out the shareware. As far as most speech synthesizer systems and screen readers are concerned which run under msdos, with a few noteable exceptions like Artic's symphonix 200 synthesizer most can operate in anything from an xt to a pentium. Not good to try running them on dec rainbow computers, since most of these systems expect some flavor of ansi or vt100 as a base terminal interface. One final suggestion for anyone thinking about marketing software after the appropriate labeling described above. Use Egghead for the stuff that will work, all anyone has to do with Egghead is call them up and transact business over the phone. CompUSA might be another possibility for this for that same reason. jude